Gratuitous Space Battles: Galactic Conquests expansion out now

Gratuitous Space Battles provides a hands-off take on massive space battles. You customise your entire fleet, right down to the weapons and shields on each ship, and then set them up in formation and set them loose on the enemy. It combines chin-stroking strategic planning with explosive space-blam on a massive scale. The latest expansion adds new graphics, a single player campaign that lets you fight fleets designed by other players, and the ability to capture enemy ships.

Here's a list of the new features added by the latest expansion.

Mid-battle fleet-wide 'retreat' option

Post-battle repairs

You can scrap ships to reclaim the crew and a part of the construction cost

Shipyards, in 3 different sizes

Factories produce cash, academies produce crew

Repair yards fix your ships after battle

Enemy ships can be captured once victory is declared

Loyalty and threat levels modelled for each of your worlds

Attack and move fleets between systems only through established hyperspace wormholes

Three difficulty settings, to suit all levels of player

New campaign-specific manual to instruct would-be galactic conquerors

New campaign music

'Massively singleplayer' feature pits you against fleets designed by other players

Lots of new background graphics and planets to fight over

Spatial anomalies force you to fight some battles in adverse conditions, or with limited ship choices

The expansion's available now on Steam and from the Positech Games site. For more on the game, head over to the Gratuitous Space Battles site. If you like the idea of massive space battles without fiddly mid-battle micromanagement you might want to check out the demo .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom stopped being a productive human being when he realised that the beige box under his desk could play Alpha Centauri. After Deus Ex and Diablo 2 he realised he was cursed to play amazing PC games forever. He started writing about them for PC Gamer about six years ago, and is now UK web ed.